by the author of dead companies walking

Post navigation

Long time readers will know that Grand Canyon Education (LOPE) has been a core holding of my $100M fund for the last five years. Grand Canyon operates a beautiful 300-acre college campus ten miles north of downtown Phoenix. The school will enroll 17,000 ‘ground students’ next fall. It also has over 60,000 online students, most of whom are adult learners (over 21 years old) seeking to restart their undergraduate studies or pursuing certificates and master’s degrees in their chosen professions.

I first wrote about Grand Canyon nearly three years ago, just before I gave a presentation on it at the 2014 Ira Sohn Conference in San Francisco. LOPE was trading for around $43 a share at the time. I continued to write about Grand Canyon over the next two years, praising its impressive growth, smart management, and the quality education it provided. And yet, despite doubling its EPS and beating analysts’ estimates over a dozen quarters in a row, the stock barely budged. At the time of my last piece on the company, in April of 2016, LOPE was trading for … around $43 a share.

The main reason for LOPE’s persistently flat performance was that it was a very good stock in a very lousy neighborhood. The negative sentiment around the for-profit education industry—which is well-deserved for nearly every company in it, with the exception of Grand Canyon—kept investors from buying into what was one of the most impressive businesses I have ever come across in my three decades of money management.

It took until last fall for the markets to finally recognize Grand Canyon’s excellence. LOPE hit $80 last week, up roughly 100 percent over the last year and nearly 300 percent since my fund first entered the position. Nonetheless, I believe Grand Canyon remains one the best growth companies in America today.

Snap, Inc. didn’t wait long to let down its eager investors. Year-over-year, revenues in its first quarter as a public concern were up almost 300 percent, but that badly lagged expectations and even fell short of last quarter’s number. User growth was tepid, as well. The former unicorn gained a mere 8 million new customers over last quarter. The markets don’t tend to like growth stocks that stop growing and Snap’s stock predictably reeled on the news, dropping almost $5 to $18.05, well below its $27 March all-time-high and barely above its $17 IPO price earlier that month. Oh yeah, Snap also lost $2.2 billion dollars, most of it in a one-time non-cash charge for stock-based compensation. At least some people are getting rich off the company. Its shareholders? Not so much.

First and foremost, Snap’s drop is a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to buy into an IPO. Numerous academic studies have shown what a bad idea this is. As a group, newly minted stocks underperform the market over any meaningful time period. The great performance by Snap’s primary competitor Facebook is the exception, not the rule. Most IPOs gap up on the first day of trading, but soon fall off. Many become single digit midgets in a few short years. I’ve been around long enough to see this play out repeatedly across multiple industries. Believe it or not, for a time in the 1980s, the hottest IPOs in the market were in the asbestos abatement business. Like Snap, these companies were afforded grotesque valuations on astronomical growth projections. Like Snap, they all soared on their debuts and gagged shortly thereafter. Many went all the way to zero. A few years later, the IPO craze du jour was CD-Rom education companies. They, too, failed to justify their rich valuations.

Short selling sounds sexy. Uncovering accounting fraud or identifying companies promoting faddish products or services can be exciting. But short selling is often an unprofitable and frustrating activity, best left to institutional investors. Most ‘professional’ short sellers have produced awful results. The $110M AUM Federated Prudent Bear fund is down 75 percent over the last 18 years. The $186M AUM Grizzly short fund is down 90 percent since 2000. And famous New York short seller Jim Chanos’ Kynikos short fund has reportedly turned $1 into a dime since its inception.

The population of dedicated short sellers has steadily declined during my three decades in money management. Most, if not all, delivered disappointing performance, lost assets, and closed shop. Some claim that, despite losing money, they generated ‘alpha’ because their funds declined less than the indexes advanced. This is like bragging about finishing second-to-last in a game of Russian roulette where there are five bullets in a six shooter. You may have lasted longer than the average participant, but you are still dead.

Today, many managers are shorting index funds and ETFs to claim their funds are market neutral. Why do they do this? To justify charging a performance fee without doing the intensive research required to identify and profit from winning short investments. Because the best short ideas almost always have market capitalizations below $200M—and have minimal trading liquidity—asset managers with excessive AUM cannot make meaningful short bets in troubled, often low priced stocks where the risk-reward ratio is on the side of short sellers.

Given the difficulty and risks, individual investors are advised to avoid shorting. But identifying stocks that are likely to decline—possibly to zero—can provide insights into stocks all investors should avoid owning. Simply put, the best stocks to short are the worst stocks to buy. This might seem like a blatantly obvious statement, but folks consistently buy stocks they would be better off shorting and short stocks they’d be better off buying. Here are a few reasons why this happens:

The “Trump Bump” will soon come to an end, and earnings will once again drive stocks higher or lower. Bulls think 2017 S&P operating earnings could hit $130 per share. Who knows if this happens? Even in times of relative stability, it’s foolish to predict the markets—and probably the only thing everyone can agree on these days is that our current situation is far from stable. There are too many variables, including uncertainties about the policies President-elect Trump will put forward, to have any clue where the market will wind up at year’s end. Will Trump succeed in cutting the corporate tax rate or start a crippling trade war with China? Will he “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act or throw the whole healthcare sector into chaos? Your guess is as good as mine, and anybody who claims to know is probably a partisan hack or a salesperson, or both.

One thing we can be sure of is that, as always, a handful of big movers will disproportionately impact the indexes in 2017. Last year Nvidia was that stock. I wish I knew what this year’s breakout name will be, but all I can offer with some certainty is that even if the indexes post another year of low double-digit increases, more stocks will struggle than flourish. Quite a few businesses could vanish altogether. Avoiding these laggards and soon-to-be zeroes is just as important to investing success as scouting for potential five or ten baggers. And one of the best ways to do so is to identify larger secular trends.

Stocks have soared ever since Donald Trump stunned everyone by winning the presidency, but Trump’s victory was far from a landslide mandate. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over 2.6M votes. This marks the fifth time a president has won the electoral college but lost the popular vote—and Trump’s popular vote deficit was much larger than the previous four times this election outcome occurred.

But before Democrats claim a moral victory, they would be wise to examine the congressional tally. According to the Wall Street Journal, Republicans won 3M more House votes than Democrats. That means a staggering 5.5M voters picked Clinton and then voted for a Republican congressional candidate—which not only speaks volumes to Trump’s personal unpopularity, but to the rightward drift of white voters.

Donald Trump’s stunning victory blindsided investors and media pundits alike—not to mention part-time finance bloggers like myself. Last week, I all but guaranteed a Clinton victory, and predicted that it would probably lead to slower earnings growth for health care and energy companies, as well as continued anemic economic growth for the country as a whole.

After one of the longest, weirdest, and most exhausting election seasons in our history, we are only six days away from (finally) choosing a new president. As importantly, 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats are up for grabs.

Investors are justifiably nervous about the outcome. Yesterday’s selloff was probably a symptom of that unease. Betting markets currently predict Hillary Clinton has a 70-75 percent chance of winning. I suspect her odds are much better. Four years ago Obama’s five million vote victory was fueled by a 56 to 44 percent majority of female voters and an even greater 74 to 26 percent majority of Hispanic voters. I am 99 percent certain Trump will do worse with both groups. Ever since he announced his candidacy Republican leaders (and media talking heads) have known that women and Hispanics would be his Achilles heel and yet, shockingly, he has made no effort to improve his appeal to these voters. Either he is delusional about his chances or simply refuses to learn the daunting math required for a Republican to win the general election.

The Donald’s only hope is the fact middle-of-the-road voters seem to dislike Hillary almost as much as they dislike him.

Stock picking is hard. Most institutional and retail stock pickers underperform the indexes. But every investor could improve the likelihood they beat the market by following one rule:

Avoid high profile, controversial companies where an adverse news event could produce an overnight price collapse.

Three stocks have proven the utility of this investing rule in spades: Valeant Pharma, Wells Fargo, and Mylan Labs. All three have been scrutinized for behavior labeled unethical by some and illegal by others, and all three have cost their investors in a big way because of it.

Nearly a decade after the financial crisis interest rates remain at zero. Fed watchers have been arguing for years that policymakers will soon raise rates, only to see the possibility put off yet again (and again and again). While many believe Yellen and company have stuck with ZIRP due to worries about the impact of a hike on the stock market, a bigger concern might be housing.

On Monday night, more than eighty million Americans watched our two candidates for president argue more about missing tax returns, deleted emails, and a former beauty queen than the issue that matters most to our country’s health and prosperity: economic growth.

When our economy grows rapidly, as it did during the Reagan and (Bill) Clinton administrations, good things happen. Home ownership increases, budget deficits shrink (Mr. Clinton produced a surplus his last four years), crime drops, and America’s influence increases worldwide. Unfortunately, our gross domestic product hasn’t grown more than four percent a year since the end of the last century, and I don’t see it topping that critical figure again anytime soon.

"[Scott Fearon's] insights on the common ways that mature companies often doom themselves apply equally well to start-ups. Every business, young or old, needs to avoid the ... mistakes that he outlines."

About the Author

Scott Fearon has spent thirty years in the financial services industry.
Since 1991, Scott has managed a hedge fund in Northern California that invests in fast-growing companies with little or no Wall Street coverage while shorting the stocks of distressed businesses on their way bankruptcy.